Alex Van Elgort and I attended this year’s American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) convention in San Diego. Alex presented her work on the DNA replication stress induced nucleophagy pathway (see below). I am grateful to those in the field for lending their support, asking great questions and providing helpful answers for us new to the field. Despite the increase in the linkages between cellular pathways, I was struck by the gulf of familiarity between related sub-disciplines, including cytokinesis, nuclear envelope dynamics, autophagy and not to mention chromosome biology. It’s hard work uniting seemingly disparate fields, but I see this as an excellent mission for ASCB where so many researchers come together under one roof.
I presented Luis’ and Alex’s work on septins in autophagy. There was an impressive amount of work on septins presented in the poster sessions. Of interest were a number of posters taking a biochemical approach to septin complexes important for cytokinesis. Amazingly, there still seems to be two camps of thoughts regarding septins as diffusion barriers and as scaffolds for other proteins. This debate seems like one that needs resolution for the field to move forward, one that unites these two ideas into a working model that allows for better experiments. Perhaps a session at the next ASCB?
